Politics of Capitalism

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

Debt Threats: The Cultural Politics of Capitalism Debt is a topic that makes news headlines regularly: politicians propose plans to eliminate student debt, the national debt rises, and debt is hampering access to medical care. Debt is deepening inequalities, and while it has been a focus for scholars of economics, it is also increasingly a concern for those who study US culture. In this seminar, we marshal recent scholarship from Women's and Gender Studies to understand how debt functions, whom it fails, and what it says about economic inequality and its relationship to race and gender in the contemporary US. We work together to understand the moral charge of debt and we ask how ideas about personal responsibility circulate. The course begins with an introduction to racial capitalism; then, the remaining class meetings are organized around topics including student debt, medical debt, housing debt, reparations for Black Americans, municipal/state/national debt, incarceration, and the relationship of debt and climate disaster.